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Can Microsoft Afford To Lose With Windows 8?
snydeq writes with the opinion that Microsoft can afford Windows 8 failing on the desktop. From the article: "Windows 8 is an experiment that may well fail, but Microsoft will cull invaluable feedback for Windows 9 in the process, long before Windows 7 runs out of gas, writes InfoWorld's Serdar Yegulalp. 'Can Microsoft really afford to alienate one of its biggest market segments for a whole product cycle? In a word: Yes. In fact, doing something this risky might well be vital to Microsoft's survival,' Yegulalp writes. 'Microsoft needs to gamble, and right now might well be the best time for the company to do it. The company needs to learn from its mistakes as quickly and nimbly as they can — and then turn around and make Windows 9 exceed all of our expectations.'"
Microsoft has managed to weather several OS flops (Windows Me anyone?) thanks to their domination of the market, but with Android gadgets and iPhones becoming pervasive can they pull it off again?
This has happened before, and it will happen again.
Windows 95 - Stable
98 - Bluescreening POS
2000 - stable as a rock
ME - less said about it the better
XP - Good enough that MS is having a tough time getting people to part with it
Vista - Disaster at launch, heard its better post SP1 but thats too late
7 - Quite good
8 - likely to be rejected by enterprises for a kiddish interface unless the UI changes
Microsoft are marketing experts. There will always be the masses that are suseptible to the hype of marketing... that's what it's designed for. You can see as the names are totally emotional and illogical (XP, Vista, 7 now 8). With each version it's just another version of Windows NT... Of course they need to fix a few things that don't work too well (or at all), and also add features for the geeks. But the main thing is to make it look new and 'trendy'.
I read every day about how Apple has won and everyone had an android phone, but in the real world, the people who say "what's slashdot?" also don't remember Windows ME or Microsoft Bob. And a computer is a Windows machine and you write Word docs, and you "make a PowerPoint" for a presentation.
Sure, people complain about Windows, but macs are just too weird and, after all, it's just a tool.
At least in this school district, they've trained another generation who thinks that computer == Windows.
Apache guy, Open Source enthusiast, runner
Win98SE? WinME? Vista? I just threw up a little in my mouth
Irrespective of wether you use Windows or not, thousands of Windows PCs around the world are sold everyday by multiple vendors backed by hardware / software warranties. What happens if Windows 8 fails ? Nothing. Windows 7 will cascade the failure until next product refresh. Tablet or PC, is not a question faced by CIOs for 90% of their workforce still. The fact in case that Windows 8 works great, if happens true, is immaterial!
I come to Slashdot only to read sigs. One you are reading is mine.
instead of releasing a version people don't want and "culling valuable feedback", why release what people don't want in the first place?
Who's asking for this stuff?
Don't people actually do, you know, work with their computers? Invoices, reports, letters to vendors and customers, research, etc.? Also dev, CNC, CRM, CMS, movie/pic editing, and more.
Who is it that stares at their start menu/screen/whatever all day and gush with wonderment? People with work to do open their programs in the morning and ... work.
On the other hand, I have to grudgingly admint (as a Linux fan) MS really has something going with Sharepoint and OneNote. Cool stuff in the window environment/OS? Not so much.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Windows Vista alienated many corporates, who went straight from XP to Windows 7. The same will probably happen with Windows 8.
I have installed the consumer preview. I cannot stand the Metro interface with Mouse and Keyboard. My colleague has it on a tablet and it seems to work fine with fingers. This is similar to Vista when all the tech bloggers had bad reviews on it and still MS made billions on it. Same thing happens, by Windows 9, they will have users adopted to this UI or tweaked it like they did in Windows7.
I'm surprised that many in the industry don't see tablets for what they generally are: a useless niche device surrounded by endless media hype.
Apple's success with smart phones and tablets is very misleading. Execs and managers see high sales numbers for these devices from Apple, and think that there's some sort of real demand, driven by utility. That just isn't the case when dealing with Apple, however. People generally buy Apple devices for reasons of vanity, not utility. Apple peddles a religion more than it peddles technology. Certain foolish people will spend huge amounts of money on anything Apple cranks out.
This is exactly why basically every other attempt to get into the tablet market has failed, or at best has not been a complete disaster. Samsung, HP, and RIM, among others, are excellent evidence of this. They went into the tablet market thinking they were selling technology. They suffered from comparatively few sales, because very few people actually need or even just want tablets for any useful purpose.
Tablets are much like Ruby on Rails. Yes, there's some small technological element. But the hype isn't about the technology. It's about the semi-religious culture infecting the people who hype and use the technology. In the case of the iPad, it's about owning devices with the right logo. In the case of Ruby on Rails, it's about buzzwords. It's not surprising that so many of the staunchest Rails advocates are also Apple users. They're a perfect match of hype, ignorance, and a false sense of superiority.
In fact, it's doubtful that any other company or project can actually compete in such a situation. There are only so many fanatics to go around, and these fanatics are very reluctant to not follow the chosen path. The moment they start to deviate, they become individuals, and thus lose much of the comfort that comes from being part of the Apple or the Rails cultures. That's why I suspect there can only be, at most, one hype-driven, quasi-religious consumer base for vanity technologies. They inherently have to be a monopoly.
Have you seen the consumer preview? M$ has screwed the pooch so badly with W8 that even now they're talking about how W9 will fix its problems...even before it has even been released.
This is the normal Windows development cycle, no? But seriously, Microsoft are quite rightly worried about their lack of influence in the arena of slick 'cool' operating systems and so they're trying to build a new OS that does both the desktop and the smart phone. As a developer I worry that they're going to end up with something that's no good for either. If they do, they'll probably take a step back with 9, and maybe 8 will end up being seen as nothing more than a concept product.
Of course MS can afford a product cycle that isn't hugely popular. Their biggest competition for Windows 8 is Windows 7, which gets the job done for most people. Vista sucked in large part because people were quite happy with windows XP and didn't really want anything else.
Where they can't really afford to flop is in mobile. But they seem to have the right general idea, one core OS for both desktop and mobile (making cross platform development and use much easier), and then something that is unique from iPhone/Android. Whether it gets market traction or not who knows, but they seem to have some generally good ideas. Their desktop... meh. People can stick with windows 7 for a year or two longer while they figure out what the most important things to change from 8 are.
The other thing is that many of us on /. may not quite grasp how normal people use computers, and how much simpler something like live tiles could be. How many computers do you see that have a desktop full of icons, people who can't manage simple things like bookmarks etc.
And as I say, it's not like MS has any meaningful competition in the desktop space right now. Arguably there is a surge in mac uptake among young people especially, that poses some potential longer term risks, but then Apple without the reality distortion bubble is going to have a much harder time in the long run too, so that provides some longer term advantages. Probably it'll even out in the end.
MS was able to afford mistakes in the desktop market because they were pretty much a monopoly. They had a huge user base that would just wait. The customers had no real alternative.
MS is not in the same situation with the mobile market. They are not a monopoly, they do not have a significant market share, and it is a different market.
Only time will tell if MS makes the right or wrong choices to win back some of the mobile market share.
note: I deliberately avoided the whole topic of the mobile and desktop OS markets merging.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Because it's only practical for tablets and phones to be used for monitoring and reading related tasks.
When it comes to actually creating things though, whether that is code, office documents or anything else, there is no substitute for a desktop or notebook PC.
Sure, you "can" use a tablet to do these things, but it's far more awkward and is far less productive.
Macs, are an alternative, however they are prohibitively expensive and that is the reason why they won't really challenge Microsoft.
Linux, although in principle the perfect system, still suffers from a lack of software from 3rd parties that is essential for office and production work (I'm talking outside of Open/Libre Office).
While Macs are getting more and more support and ports due to its rising popularity, Linux isn't getting the same.
However, the real danger for Microsoft, is HTML5 and (*cringes*) The Cloud. These things are platform independent and don't need Windows specifically to run.
Years and years of Microsoft going "what does the consumer want" has lead to this. Uncomplicated. Pretty. Microsoft needs to take a page from apple--step back and objectively ask "would I enjoy using this piece of shit?". Ask their tech support "would you enjoy troubleshooting this piece of shit?". That would be some constructive feedback.
Win98(good) -> WinME(crap) ->WinXP(good) -> Vista(oh dear Lord, what on earth is going on? This is dire - What's it doing to the HDD? Yes I do want to run that? *click* I'm sure, Yes. What's this Linux I've been reading about? )
Stuff like that. I've not had to do any business admin for Vista. Have I been lucky?
"Win 9x (95/95 OSR2/98/98SE/ME) was overall a steaming pile of dung."
Win 95 was pretty good for its time as far as MIcrosoft goes. Believe me, if you'd had to use Win 3.1 for any length of time you'd have worshipped that Win95 CD when it showed up. Ok , compared to any unix OS or even OS/2 it was shit, but compared to what MS did before it was a step change.
In a world where gadgets replace personal computers does Windows 8 or 9 even matter? Wouldn't Windows Phone be the relevant operating system? It's not like if Windows 9 is suddenly amazing, people are going to start shoving laptops in their pockets.
So far in fact that its its being swamped by the waves of derision. I can't believe anyone at MS seriously believes that whats a good UI for a handheld keyboard free tablet with touch interface is a good UI for a desktop corporate PC with a mouse. Sure, the old XP/7 style UI can be used but why should you have to dig around for it, why isn't it the default and why should app developers have to decide whether to develop for Metro or "Legacy" Windows? Sorry , this makes no sense - MS have seriously fscked up this time. I'm sure under the covers that Win8 is a very professional OS , but the Metro GUI is going to kill it in MS's cash cow sector - ie corporate unless they sort the mess out now. Many corps are only now considering Win7, there isn't a cat in hells chance of them considering Win8 with a Metro interface.
The summary says, "Microsoft has managed to weather several OS flops (Windows Me anyone?)"
In my opinion, those are not "flops". Microsoft apparently deliberately releases bad versions to make more money. I understand that it was discovered during the Vista court case that a Microsoft top manager said the Vista was not ready for release, but Vista was released anyway. (I could not find a reference to the exact language.)
Microsoft released bad versions in the DOS days, also. In all cases of which I am aware, there was no free replacement. Buyers of bad versions were expected to pay again.
Everyone who owns Windows 7 get windows 8 for free. Then Microsoft can get all the valuable feedback it wants without making us pay to be their guinea pigs.
Is it worth it for Microsoft to alternate between a solid OS and a crappy one?
Win98(good) -> WinME(crap) ->WinXP(good) -> Vista(crap)
They don't need to alternate, they can always go with:
Win8(crap)->Win9(crap)->Win10(crap)->...
In love, war and slashdot discussions, everything is allowed.
Remember, this is all about forcing their way into the tablet market, by leveraging their desktop monopoly. That monopoly is safe, manufacturers will supply PCs with Win8 when Microsoft tells them to whatever happens, the majority will continue dumbly consuming media on their laptops without even noticing the OS is now dumbed down. And in Microsofts dreams they'll pick a tablet running the same disneyfied UI as their desktop or laptop.
So yes, Microsoft can afford to screw over the desktop. That's the nature of a monopoly and most of their users really don't need a fully usable PC anyway.
Will it succeed in buying tablet share? IMHO too little, too late. All the tablet OSes are so dumbed down there's no compelling reason to pick one over another. If the choice is using the same OS as your PC or your phone there's no obvious winner there, I doubt Microsoft will drive many choices this way. If WP7 had a decent market share maybe that would be different, like Win8 it was too late to market to succeed.
In the long term, if Metro actually succeeds it can only make competition like Chrome look viable to users on the desktop. I can see a future where Win9 has to differentiate itself from Chrome and Android on the desktop by reverting back to classic windows. But by then the mass market will find that an alien concept. Microsoft was going to lose control sometime, this abuse of monopoly just brings it a little earlier.
I wonder if Windows 8 will actually default to the correct time zone _after_ I've already told it what country I am in. I was amazed to find that Windows 7 still, after all these years, didn't when I was setting up my new laptop last week.
People always leave out W2k for some reason. W2k was really good.
As to Windows 8 yes microsoft can survive Windows 8 on the desktop market. What will hurt is the fact that desktops and notebooks are becoming less important as mobile is becoming more important. WP7 is a fizzle. It isn't bad but but it is not popular and is not better than IOS or Android at this time.
Microsoft and Nokia are betting that the Nokia 900 will be a smash hit. The problem is that I just don't see it happening. I could be wrong but Nokia and Microsoft are just not on many peoples radar here in the US in the mobile market. Nokia is in a better position in the EU and in some emerging markets but Microsoft sure is not.
Yes Windows 8 will not kill Microsoft on the desktop. People will keep Windows 7 and they may fix it with Windows 9
Windows 8 has a good chance of killing Microsoft in the mobile market.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Ah microsoft... when you have an 85% (or 70 or 95 depending on whose clicks you believe) market share, you don't compete with the 12% runner up by releasing some cute toy. You do it by releasing more of what you are already doing to win. If windows 7 works for someone, nothing else will. If windows 8 works for them, ANYTHING else will (from an interface perspective, it is the worst, despite buggy workarounds to make it act like a pc)... do you see the problem? If people wanted something cute and narrow purpose they would buy a mac/pod/pad.
I don't really understand the drive to make computing more *fun* or whatever the fuck that irritating waste of time Metro is supposed to be. All that boring expensive stuff, yeah that is what pays the Bill/bills... Keep doing that.
I'm surprised that many in the industry don't see tablets for what they generally are: a useless niche device surrounded by endless media hype.
Agreed, they have no user file-system, no world-class 4G wireless, and less space than a nomad, and that's why they're selling tens of millions a quarter....
http://www.statista.com/statistics/165489/global-sales-of-apple-ipad-by-quarter-since-2010/
Tablets are much like Ruby on Rails...In the case of the iPad, it's about owning devices with the right logo. In the case of Ruby on Rails, it's about buzzwords...They're a perfect match of hype, ignorance, and a false sense of superiority.
The only ignorance and false sense of superiority I've encountered about rails was from haters who have never used it. Have you? It's just a web framework, maybe one of the better ones, maybe not, but it has become the focus of ire perhaps because people are so insecure in their technological choices they feel the need to look down on a web framework (WTF?). Rails is useful for some sites (I have used it on some myself), and other languages like PHP or Java have their place as well depending on specific requirements and code available in libraries etc. Buzzwords don't come into it, nor do logos, at least in my case, and I've never met anyone who made their choices based on such things. If any widely used web language deserves to be panned, it's PHP for its awful, messy API, though they have cleaned up their act recently. Rails is pretty middle of the road, and it's just a web framework.
As to the iPad, it's a pretty good device, for what it is, and frankly it covers 100% of the computing usage pattern of most people I know (web, email, games) - yes it doesn't cover the needs of everyone, but that's ok, if it is popular it's not going to cause your computer to be confiscated or to spontaneously combust - you can continue to live in a world where the iPad is popular, and feel no pain, so long as you can manage to tolerate the thought that others might have different needs to you. Can't think why anyone would buy something purely because it has a logo on it - I bought an iPad because it is a good tablet, and I wanted a tablet to read the web and mail on, that's it, and it is has served admirably for that purpose.
In fact, it's doubtful that any other company or project can actually compete in such a situation.
Bullshit. Android has been doing pretty well, in spite of fragmentation and several mis-steps by Google like Google Play. The only people who think like a cult are those who feel they must oppose everything Apple or everything Rails without question or thought. If you want to criticise Apple, criticise their predatory business practices, their monopoly on the marketplace, their banning scripting from the store, their blatant ripping off of other developers, but don't try to criticise a device which is best of class, and really popular, as somehow doing well because it has a logo or people are enlisted in a cult! People are buying the iPad in their millions because it is good, and they find it useful. Deal.
Sure they can afford to lose, but why don't they just try to win to begin with? If you do enough research it's easier to get people on board and find out if it will be a good idea. Hire the Chic-fil-a marketing team, they'll make it happen. Do something different. If you know it will flop because it's an experiment then treat it like one and don't charge for it. Try to get people to give meaningful feedback about why it sucks instead of: "This is the worst OS ever, period."
Windows 9 will not be a step back from 8.
Here are the facts
1. PCs are not going away. Heavy duty document and photo editing needs a real PC, not a tablet or smartphone.
2. OEMs are only selling winodws. So windows 8, 9, and 10 will all have a home...on the next new Computer you buy.
3. The Metro Interface allows Microsoft to get in on the "App Store" action. All software being sold through their own store and them taking part of the profit is to strong of force for them to ignore.
Call it doubling down on stupid if you want. Microsoft is just like Apple in this. Give them both one or two OS revisions and all software will be sold through their app store and only pirates or big corps with special needs will sideload apps.
vi +
I used to be like that. Although we had an XP box in 2002, I never made the switch from using ME on my personal machine until 2005. Windows 7 was the complete opposite - I got it through work several months before the retail launch. The fact that Windows 7 is the first MS OS since 98 to run well on "average to older" hardware is a major contributing factor. Let games be the one to require a huge jump in hardware capabilities, operating systems should not require 1+ GB RAM when a lot of people are still using 512MB.
I have heard people say numerous times that they don't want a Windows phone because they don't want a phone that crashes or is insecure
So instead they run Android.
lol
Intel is doing the Tick-Tock cycle for their processor families/flagship products, that sort of sounds like what the author is suggesting here, except for Microsoft's flagship product instead.
Tock: Win 2000
Tick: Win XP
Tock: Win Vista
Tick: Win 7
Tock: Win 8
Tick: Win 9
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock
moox. for a new generation.
Microsoft OS's tend to skip version in that WinXP was/is useful, Vista crap, Win7 good, WIn8 is just WIn7 with tweaks and a really bad metro interface especially if you're using it on a desktop.
If you look backwards you will see the "skips a generation" works as well.
So win8 is forgettable, it isn't a new OS at it's core and the tablet GUI is so...meh, Apple is just too far ahead on the design of tablet interfaces nd they have captured the psyche of the average punter.
I'll be using Win7 for the next 10 years just like I did XP.
I won't be going past Snow Leopard on my Mac's and I still use Ubuntu 10.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
10char
They can get away with this in the corporate world because their corporate customers don't upgrade every OS version anyway. They can (and IMHO will) ignore Windows 8. It'll be a huge flop in the Enterprise. It doesn't matter a lot because those customers will use the highly capable Windows 7 instead. When Windows 9 fixes most of the suck, the natural slow upgrade cycle can do its thing.
For home users? Maybe? If you want a PC your options are pretty limited, but if people (particularly not tech-savvy people) hear that their friend got a new computer and had to relearn how to use the thing, they're not going to be eager to run out and buy. It may turn them towards other options, or away from PCs entirely and towards tablets instead. A lot of what goes on at home on the computer is just surfing and social networking, and those things work perfectly well on a tablet. I know the absolute last thing my dad ever wants to do is learn Metro and then have to keep track of the UI switching back and forth constantly like it's prone to do in Windows 8 (particularly since for serious business apps Metro stuff just won't exist for quite a while, porting to something that almost no Windows systems can actually run is not going to be a popular option).
In the mobile space? If Windows 8 is a failure on tablets, by time they can try again the other players will be so entrenched that dislodging them will be incredibly difficult. That IMHO is why they're throwing everything in Windows 8 at the tablet experience. They can't afford to screw it up the way they can get away with screwing it up for corporate users.
Personally I expect Windows 8 to be a failure precisely because Metro is lousy on desktops. People who try it are going to remember that part and project the experience onto tablets, even if it's better there. Consider how fast "Vista sucks" became common knowledge even amongst people who never touched Vista. That'll happen again and it'll poison the tablet sales simply because people don't differentiate between "Windows 8 on tablet" and "Windows 8 on desktop" in the mass market. "Windows 8 sucks" is all-inclusive.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I never quite understood the stigma against ME. It always worked fine for me. XP was a complete nightmare of bugs at least until SP2 and Vista was basically the same way. Meh.. I run Linux exclusively these days and boot into XP for an occasional game. It's nice to finally have enough usability in Linux that I don't even know what Windows 8 looks like.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
The problem is that Microsoft wants to get into the phone & tablet markets, where their marketshare is more like 1%. Metro in that market by the accounts I've heard from people who have a Windows Phone 7 is pretty good.
It's a really bad strategy when you take a tablet UI and force it on Desktop PC users though. That's where I agree with you. They're screwing up the market they have to try and create a unified platform for a market they don't have, and I don't think it's going to work.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Marketing experts? Bill Gates in a mall eating a f*cking churro and wiggling his butt walking though the parking lot?
Yes, marketing experts. For a certain market.
Bill Gates sure does look like the type of fellow who blends right in a bland corporate world, doesn't he? That's what Microsoft products have always been out--tools to get the job done, in a style and presentation that is attractive to mass market corporate types.
Yes, there's lots of hype surrounding tablets but that does not mean there are no compelling reasons to use one over a PC. You're just being narrow minded if you think there aren't any.
Tablets will co-exist with PCs, just like phones co-exist with PCs. They all have their uses and do some things better than others. If I'm doing any serious dev / design work, it will be on my laptop so I can type at a decent rate and use a precision pointing device. When I'm on the move or somewhere I can't just pull up a chair and clear some desk space in order to perform a task, it will be with my smart phone or tablet, depending on what screen size / weight serves my purpose better. If I'm lazing at home, browsing the web, replying to email, watching video, etc, it will almost always be via my tablet. Not because of hype, but because after a year of using all these types of devices, I know how one is more suited to something than another.
This of course relies on the software I need to use being available for the relevant platform, but for a significant percentage of my work, that is the case, as it is for many others and increasingly so with the use of web apps and the like.
They're all just internet ready devices running very capable OS's at the end of the day, but with varying ease of mobility.
Well you need an alternative to fill the gap for the hardware base/user demographic. There isn't one. For the hardware base and user demographic.
I agree. They will get rid of invaluable feedback like the pesty fly it is.
You could try to pay me to accept a copy of Windows 8. I would gladly accept money to install Win 8 into my garbage can.
>For simple reasons: It is coherent
Windows 8 is about as coherent as a a drunk who has just finished his third bottle of Mad Dog 20/20.
Two competing UI paradigms powered up in the same OS simultaneously is not the definition of coherence and consistency in UI.
--
BMO
I figured that I'd just do what I did with Vista, and run the server edition of Windows 8 instead of the consumer edition, so that I can have all the new capabilities without the tablet UI.
No such luck.
I ran up the beta and got a few things up and running on it, and it's just mind-blowing to experience how horrendously unusable it is first hand. This is the server edition, mind you, and it had animations, things sliding around, the start menu is gone, and some notification popped up that said something like "tap here to view details". Tap? On a server? Are you kidding me? Everything is a tablet now?
The strangest thing is that the PowerShell 3 command line is so fantastically good* that I almost don't care that they've fucked up the GUI, but for most people any improvements are going to be swamped by the atrocious user interface.
They've stuffed up everything. Things like the new Server Manager look pretty, but it does odd things like adding new menu items after a delay. After clicking some item like a server role, at first maybe only three or four menu items would be shown, so you think, ah well, nothing I can do here... and then after two seconds more menu items appear out of nowhere. If you're like me and click fast, you can miss critical things because some idiot decided to lather on the WinRT asynchronous APIs without any thought to the impact on usability. It's one thing if a placeholder changes after a delay, but to keep structure hidden until an arbitrary delay is a huge design flaw. And why the fuck is it asynchronous in the first place, anyway? Why aren't menu items known ahead of time, like you know... in all other software ever made by man?
Everything has cute tiles now, none of which are big enough to show their text content, so you find yourself having to choose between "Active Direct...", "Active Direct...", or "Active Direct...". It doesn't help that the icons are all cool and Metro and lack distinguishing characteristics.
I love the nested scrollbars, where the horizontal and vertical scrollbars are attached to two different controls with different sizes, where one of them can be used to scroll the other scrollbar into an invisible location.
Of course, everybody has covered the idiocy of Microsoft deciding to eliminate the Start menu, but on Windows Server it's particularly bad because there's a vaguely similar looking icon in its place! If you don't click exactly in the corner of the screen, you launch Server Manager instead, which is not a lightweight app, and can take a while to launch even on an SSD. Expect to learn quickly from your mistakes, because you'll be punished for making them. A lot.
I still haven't figured out how to quickly get a list of all start menu items, without first searching for something and then erasing the search term so that everything matches. I'm sure there's a better way, but it's not obvious to me.
Some of these things might be a bit nitpicky, but from what I've seen the flaws are pervasive, and it's a bad sign that even the most commonly used GUI screens have glaring usability problems despite having what appears to be final layout and artwork.
It's one thing to grumble and have to get used to something new and different if it's better, but it's a whole different story when I'm forced to get used to something that is not only objectively worse, but also totally inappropriate for the type of product: "tap here" on Windows Server Datacenter Edition tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's myopic vision.
*) While they've added some impressive features to PowerShell 3, they've fixed none of the bugs. For example, (Get-ADUser "invalidusername" -EA SilentlyContinue) still throws an exception even though it was told to fail silently. This bug affects a lot of different things and was reported to Microsoft back when PowerShell 2 was still beta! I'm going to whip my crystal ball out and predict that this bug will not get fixed until, lets say, PowerShell 5 Service Pack 2, at which point nobody will care because we'll all be using Apple computers and Google cloud services instead.
That's because to most people Microsoft isn't some evil entity that needs destroying. It's just a company. If Windows works for people using it to do their jobs, they don't care about changing to something else and disrupting their work for some goal of destroying Microsoft.
They're too busy doing more important things.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
instead of releasing a version people don't want and "culling valuable feedback", why release what people don't want in the first place?
Who's asking for this stuff?
"If I had asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me faster horses." -- Henry Ford
MS has been making the same mistake since windows ME.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I wasn't charged a dime for the "Consumer Preview"......were you?
That's because W2k wasn't a home user OS. It wasn't shipped on many PCs that were sold in stores to home users. People leave out NT 4 for the same reason.
W2k happened to gain more traction in the home market then MS originally intended because of how good it was compared to Mistake Edition, but it wasn't until XP that the NT line really took off at home.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
When people say things like, "Don't be afraid to make mistakes", that doesn't generally mean go out and intentionally make mistakes. It means, if you think it's a good idea, don't be afraid to try something new.
It's obvious to anyone looking that each device has a different usage profile ( tablet, phone, workstation ), so trying to cram the same interface down every user's throat is bound to fail.
Windows WHAT? I'm still happily using XP.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I don't understand why everyone (including MS I guess) thinks tablets will eventually replace PCs. Is it just that I and everyone I know are way more verbose than the average person? Are people really going to tap out blog posts and forum posts and emails (not texts/tweets) on glass horrible excuses for virtual keyboards? really?
They have an input problem, and I don't see ANY solution that will make them a serious computing option within the next 10 years, barring a docking station that just basically makes them a PC anyway (at which point what is the point?). Voice control may not ever work, much less "soon," glass keyboards seem fine in the store, but if I had to type even this rant on one, I might shoot my tablet instead.
I have a tablet with a full usb keyboard, and that works, but I mean it isn't even more portable than a laptop at that point.
I think that what MS is looking for is another income stream and they see the App store as a way to make a lot more money from software sales. For this they will be pushing everything onto the Metro interface.
MS can probably survive the failure of 8 to really take off. However if 9 goes wrong as well they might be in trouble.
By the same token Motorola has numerous Android devices that are very sleek and work very well. Everyone of them says "high-end" when you hold it. You are spot-on with your analysis of the tablet market and Apple. A lot of people own and enjoy Motorola devices but the Apple vortex is a frenzy. They got it mailed too. They come out with a new device every year to make the people who already have one feel like they need to get rid their old device lest they be viewed as stodgy.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
Really dude? I think this ship sailed already. Lots of people have tablets, your inability to find a use case for them does not make them a terribly niche device that no serious person actually wants. Apple has not sold a few, or a fair number, they've sold tens of millions. There are still waits to get iPad 2's at some Apple stores (well maybe not since they announced the new one, but until recently). Add in the smaller number of stock Android tablets, and the fairly huge number of non-stock Android devices like the Kindle Fire and the Nook Color/Tablet, and you're talking about a device class that can now probably boasts 30-40% market penetration in a reasonable chunk of the developed world.
Back when the iPad was a new idea, you might be forgiven for seeing this all as some sort of fad.The odds were probably 50-50 that tablets would take off this time (I think that it was always going to happen eventually, there has been a steady march toward smaller and smaller computers since the first laptops; but it was maybe 50-50 that this was the right product at the right time). At this point the damn is broken. People want the things. People have uses for the things. People are coming up with new uses for the things all the time.
Apple isn't the only one selling them like hot cakes. Barnes and Noble and Amazon are too. The fact is that at the high end, only Apple is doing well because only Apple has a really standout product. They were first to market, and no one has really released anything that seems better enough to pay the same price or more for. The book sellers went low; and built solid but unexceptional products that they priced as solid, but unexceptional. Viola, profit. Now the Android guys have a new problem, the iPad 2 is even cheaper. Still not cheap enough to compete with the Kindle/Nook, but cheap enough that Samsung and company need to lower their margins even more f they want to compete. Or come out with something that really jumps in front and is worth the same price or more as Apple's offerings.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
...afford to stop posting "Can Microsoft Afford to Lose With Windows ___" stories every time there is an OS revision?
today is spelling optional day.
I still think this GUI OS thing is a fad.
I'm holding out for MS DOS 7.0
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Is saying that Win95 was a lot better than Win3.1 such a radical stance to take? I wouldn't have thought the slashdot teenage groupthinkers would have had a stance on this in the first place , most them not even being born when 3.1 was around.
I think there are compelling reasons to use a tablet over a PC. For example, people who need to use a device while they are standing on their feet, like health care workers, and law enforcement. Apple has done well to capture those markets.
But, for the most part, tablets are toys.
So, in other words Windows 8 is a user-acceptance test at the full price of an OS?
He's not totally nuts, that certainly has a ring of familiarity to it when it comes to MS.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I cannot believe all these people here posting that the desktop is dead, tablets are the future, and no one is going to use a full blown PC except for hardcore gamers.
Dudes; wake the f up. In the corporate world, the desktop PC is everywhere. What do you think people in offices are doing all day, surfing facebook? They are not because facebook is blocked by the corporate proxy.
No, the are running spreadsheets, inputting data, copying data out of custom apps built in-house that speak to gigantic Oracle databases, and pasting that data into word documents, and writing a ton of material to explain that data so that it can be understood by MBA suits who decide what stock they are buying this microsecond.
All that isn't going to be done on a tablet. Not this decade, at least.
I need two monitors at 1280 x 1024 to get my work done, and I'm still losing windows under all that clutter. I have to monitor 4 different exchange mailboxes, I have 3 browser windows, a rumba session to the mainframe and several instances of notepad and MS word running. And a CMD/DOS session for FTP, and a window to my share on the SAN.
I have to run Firefox for external web browsing but IE8 to access the internal intranet, as the apps don't format correctly under firefox.
Our machines run 24/7 because a night-shift comes in to take our places when we leave for the day.
If you really think a tablet is going to replace this infrastructure any time soon, I don't think you understand just how entrenched large corporations are in the PC. And it took them decades to get here, we still have old-timers who have worked here since before the PC was a part of the corporate world, and they only know how to use the phone, they don't send emails. Of course, most of the these folks are close to retirement.
But that means that it took 40 years to get to this point, and I think it's going to take 40 years to move to some other technology that's radically different, like a tablet.
Microsoft is smoking crack if they think we're all going to smoothly transition to a Tablet OS, even on our desktops, in anything less than 10 years.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
windows 2000 was both good and bad... at start, windows 2000 was horrible, full of bugs, lack of drivers and slower than win98... running windows 2000 was one adventure, you would never know what you would get... ...but a few years after, with service pack 4, windows 2000 turn the table and very good (as possible), it still had many security problems, but the speed, stability and the main security problems were solved... also, as time passed by, drivers and hardware got better, the only thing that windows 2000 was still very bad was the boot time. Windows XP when was lunched, it didnt had the speed, nor the stability of windows 2000, it only fixed the boot time problem as a good thing. Even after the winXP service packs, it was slower and demanded more resources than windows 2000
all that said... linux was and still is better than any windows ;)
Higuita
Windows XP was just a bloated remix of Windows 2000. One thing that also seems to be often forgotten is that XP had initially horrible security, and malware was everywhere - it was SP2 what finally made things sane.
NT4, 2000 and 7 are the solid ones.
95 was the most revolutionary, as it defined the GUI that we more or less still use.
I wonder if someday, people will stop posting yes/no questions with obvious answers on slashdot.
really hope they can't. And hope Windows 8 bombs spectacularly in the box office.
Furries make the internet go.
...and for the same reason.
If I sit down at a computer, I don't want to be given a phone/tablet interface.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
If they market a big push like they did with Vista, suggesting all XP users and new PC's will have to take the upgrade, Microsoft is going to take a big hit. The desktop is their bread and butter, even if it isn't as new and sexy as tablets. Sink that, and even a company as big as Microsoft can be permanently damaged.
Windows 8 looks like an all-in tablet experiment, designed to force desktop developers to make Metro applications. Maybe Microsoft feels they have to, because they are really playing catch-up with tablets. There is not just one well-established competitor, but two, both with thousands of apps. How many killer apps run on Metro, and when?
I think there is a real possibility that the Microsoft tablet will be a dud - too little, too late. A side-effect of the iPad 3 is there will be tons of still-viable, cheap iPad 1's and 2's flooding the second-hand market, ripe for businesses and schools, making that platform more ubiquitous. The Android platform has a big challenge ahead of it, but I wouldn't count out Google. Meanwhile, the Microsoft tablet is still on the drawing board.
The tablet is not a repeat of the PC in the 1980's and 90's. Metro could be a huge fail. Microsoft should hedge its bets and let everyone know Windows 7 will be around and supported and fixed and improved on for a long long time. Why not a Metro API layer than runs on 7, without the crippled desktop? Of course, that means fewer developers will write for Metro, but it's better than alienating them off to an uncertain, unproven platform.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
the UI seems good for tablets AND you can run your beloved windows apps on the tablet -> success
You can run your beloved windows apps on the x86 tablet for half an hour before the battery goes flat.
Why? Microsoft is a huge corporation...
Huge, established corporations rarely do anything fast. Changing an icon in Windows probably takes sixteen committee meetings.
Windows 8 is Microsoft's play for the consumer space (iPads and Android Tablets). There, I doubt it will fail. It looks to be a very strong contender there. ARM versions will be at least as capable as the competition, with a decidedly different and unique interface (instead of a "me too" copy). Intel versions will be dramatically more capable. And I think transformer laptops (tablets that convert to laptops and vice-versa) will be an interesting and significant new market niche, enabled mostly by Windows 8.
The issue here is the Desktop. And contrary to a lot of the whining, I don't think Windows 8 is a complete disaster on the Desktop. It's perfectly usable after you get used to a few new ideas. But it IS more awkward.
I think on the Desktop, most businsess will decide to stay with Windows 7 (which they're only recently starting to migrate to anyway) and will skip Windows 8 for the most part. At least for desktops. Windows 8 Server looks a bit more compelling. But the retraining costs for Windows 8 in a corporate worker-bee environment seem to be rather extreme.
But hey, at least IT organizations have job security if anyone tries.
But here's the thing: Windows 8 will run most everything Windows 7 will run, PLUS any and all new Metro apps. This is huge for tablets. It's less of a factor for desktops.
Windows 7 is solid enough that those desktop users that don't want to make the leap and have to re-learn habits so quickly won't have to. They can stick with Windows 7 and be just fine, and be perfectly happy. They can look again when Windows 9 (whatever it's called) comes out.
But I think Windows 8 on touch tablets will be pretty successful. All the weirdness and awkwardness (well, MOST of it) just melts away when you're interacting directly with the screen via touch. And it's so much more slick and capable than an iPad.
I think the real issue with Win8 tablets won't be the OS at all... it'll be the hardware that either makes or breaks it. Crappy hardware and nobody will want it no matter how nice the OS is (or isn't). If they can get partners that put some serious design and quality, at competitive price-points, then I think they'll definitely have a winner.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
As to the iPad, it's a pretty good device, for what it is, and frankly it covers 100% of the computing usage pattern of most people I know (web, email, games) - yes it doesn't cover the needs of everyone, but that's ok
I'm not a hater, per se. Like a lot of people reading these comments, I write code (of one kind or another) for a living. I'm a keyboard jockey, averaging maybe 100wpm or a bit more. And I can see myself wanting to type on almost any computing device. I'm impatient. I've got an Android phone (EVO 4G Shift) that allows me to use the on-screen keyboard (I use Swype) or the slide-out hardware keyboard. But both of those devices are so error-prone and slow (again, I'm impatient) that I frequently end up using the voice transcription tools to compose text messages or emails. Not so good for proper nouns all the time, but for common dictionary words it does quite well (with my upper-midwest accent).
If I'm someplace where I need to compose an email and all I've got is my phone, I'll do that, but I'll definitely try to keep it as short as possible. If my laptop is nearby (keyboard!) I'll always use that first. I realize that a smartphone is not the same as a tablet, but some of the handicaps are the same. Coding geeks may get tablets as a secondary computing device, but probably never as a primary one.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
Just out of curiosity...
If you were the Project Leader for Windows 8 right now, and you started hearing all this "Metro sucks" stuff, even Ballmer starts to look a bit sweaty...
What steps would you take to correct the course of the ship and make it ultimately a good product release? If a complete revamp was not possible but just something doable and smart to save Win8.
This is why MS is able and willing to experiment with the Metro Interface. The entire reason they've thrown it at the wall is to see what sticks and what slides to the floor. Is it a Gamble? Hell No. They're already comitted to providing support for Win7 until at least 2020/22 so it's absolutely not a gamble.
What people need to consider is that the Win8 Beta is designed to test the acceptance/effectiveness of the Metra UI paradign along with how well devs get a handle on the design of apps.
Metro isn't anything more exciting then an improved Active Desktop, except you now have actual apps and a coding guide for it. Now the critical element is just how robust the app restrictions will be in Metro? If they're easy to bypass then all that MS will have learned is that Metro is insecure and just another infection vector but if they manage to get it right, then it may offer them hope for creating the Perfect Lock In that Google was trying for with their Chromebooks. How would you like being locked to the MS Cloud because all of your apps reside on their systems and you rent them? That's the goal with Metro!
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Windows *Vista* anyone?
Neither you nor anyone else really knows that yet. We haven't really seen Win8 tablet hardware or battery capacities yet.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I once bought a new VCR (Mitsubishi, IIRC) that came with a videotape explaining how to hook it up to your TV.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
I've been running the Consumer Preview on a virtual box for a couple weeks, I hate it, but the more I play with it, the more it reminds me of Windows 7 Home edition.
I think it is purposely crippled for the consumer/home market.
I am thinking there is going to be a Windows 8 Professional/Enterprise version that will be targeted at the Enterprise market.
It will probably have the Start Button and have the Desktop Environment that the Enterprise market wants.
People will accept Win 8 as long as it works. Me and Vista were total flops because they were highly unstable, among lots of other warts. Most consumers will probably revert to "classic mode" once they get it, but they won't flat-out reject it the way they did Vista. Remember, Microsoft's OS sales rely on sales of new computers. If 8 works, then I wouldn't expect the downgrade debacle that happened with Vista. Then it's just a matter of how many people are buying new Windows computers.
Microsoft seems to deliberately have a Learning Experience with every other incarnation, and use those to justify 'Forced Obsolescence', resulting in mandatory roll-over of licenses, and a renewal of Income.
Surely, everyone has heard the term "Microsoft Tax"? Well, it's due again!
Win ME was a bust.
Vista was a flop.
Is Windows 8 just an "Unpleasant Gas Cloud"? Probably.
The main objection that Typical Users will (and Do) have against "The Cloud" is this: Who else has access to "The Cloud", and what can they do with it?
Overwhelmingly, the answer is "Big Brother", and Privacy Invasion by unknown third parties (perhaps, even rights sold for 'Data Mining' purposes)
Sure, Big Business likes "The Cloud" as they can put up their own servers, and keep their own in a "Bottle" so that their data remains "in house" and under their control.
Personal users, not so much.
After all, who wants to pay rent on server space in an unknown location for their music, video and personal data?
"Why, Yes, you can access it from anywhere with just about any device! And, No, we won't let just Anybody else into your data!"
Yea, right, Big Brother. We all trust you.
Now Microsoft gets to sell you twice as much Windows. The one your computer comes with, and the one you'll buy to replace it.
Twinstiq, game news
For example, people who need to use a device while they are standing on their feet, like health care workers, and law enforcement.
Why would an LEO want to stand next to an arrested, handcuffed person? There are seventeen excellent reasons to not do that.
With regard to healthcare, perhaps tablets are of use to truly mobile personnel in a large hospital. However today's dentists, for example, simply install a PC in every treatment room. The doctor simply walks in and logs in. Large screens are essential for seeing details in X-rays; many of these X-rays today are digitally produced and stored.
My sense being a long time mac user and reluctant PC user is that as far as the operating system went, up until win7, the windows OS was always inferior to the mac. What windows had going for it was better application support , it ran on less expensive gear, and it was the corporate standard (and thus an easy choice for home). Apple almost blew it with the leap from OS 9 to OSX, and by comparison windows OS was coming close. But OSX put some distance back in. XP is a joke compared to OSX.
Finally with win7 I don't see a lot of difference. The application difference is largely erased too. Office looks the same, the browsers are mostly standardized and e-mail clients on both work pleasantly. The Operating system in win7 isn't clunky. In some ways win7 is even better, especially for people who need help using their computers, those context dependent suggestions are nice.
The problem Win7 has now is that there isn't that big a price difference between comparably equipted macs and PCs. (Sure macs cost a bit more but you still have less problems. If you earn more than 30$/hour then it's possible you'll spend more on the PC in terms of lost time. Maybe not. you just don't know for sure when you buy the machine.) And the software is fairly homogenous.
So the reason to choose one over the other is now for ancillary reasons. Will it synch with my iphone or Ipad being the largest one.
My feeling is that give microsft can produce as competitive an os and win7, there's no longer any real competition over OS quality. It has more to do with everything else. Win 8 will probably be as fabulous as win7. But if they stumble, they will loose out on the ecosystem of phones and tablets driving the choice of OS. Corporations will migrate to apples. It will take a lot to recover from that,
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
MMORPGs for consoles?
That does beg the question.
What console MMORPGs, because theres fewer of those than MMOFPSs.
Back when the iPad was a new idea, you might be forgiven for seeing this all as some sort of fad.
It's still largely a fad; however it is an affordable fad, and because of that people are buying these things. Earlier tablets were a large investment. Today's tablets are cheaper and better.
I'm not trying to say here that tablets are totally useless. Nearly any item is useful. The question is only about the value/price ratio. Tablets of today are sufficiently useful to justify their cost. But that "sufficiently useful" is not as "universally useful" as a PC is. It's a niche product for mobile consumption of low quality entertainment. Guess what, there is a huge demand just for that.
As technology improves tablets (and tablet-like personal information terminals) will become even more useful. A cell phone with a 1 Gbps unmetered connection and a holographic display and a bunch of remote ("cloud") resources might be perfectly fine for nearly anyone, except perhaps a few scientists. Today we aren't there yet, so tablets give you small screen size, low performance, short battery life, slow network connection, and an UI that is necessarily awful.
The dividing line between desktops and tablets is not in their size and is not in their OS. It simply depends on "is this thing plugged in?" A stationary device is not as much concerned about power and cooling. A laptop has to worry about those things. A tablet is horrified by these things. That's why on one end of the spectrum you have a 8-core desktop with 16 GB of RAM and with a GPU that is more complex than the CPU, and then on the other end you have a small portable device with a minimalistic CPU that runs as slow as possible to save power. Convergence of those two lines is hard to achieve because at all times a scientist wants performance at any cost, and a mobile consumer wants the longest battery life (as long as he can play the latest Hungry Penguins or whatever it is that he is playing.)
Is anyone else just sick of terrible UIs in general these days?
Windows 8
Unity
GNOME 3
I'm tired of all this crap. I won't use them. I will skip Windows 8 and use old versions of Linux until they get their heads on straight - this is a PC I'm using not a damn tablet (which is just a poor excuse for a laptop anyways).
Okay, Vista was a steaming pile of $hit, and MS knew it. (It wouldn't be the first time a software product was released before prime-time; it's endemic in the software industry.) But what you are saying is something like this:
1) Spend many years and billions of dollars producing an OS designed from scratch to be a spectacular failure
2) ???
3) Profit!
I don't think the upgrade business is so lucrative that it'd pay off Vista's development costs.
I'm not seeing the step 2 here. XP was available on new machines until Windows 7 came out, so any users that didn't want it would not exactly have a tough time avoiding it.
I'm happy to announce after 8 years of faithful (*cough*) service, my parents Windows ME system has finally been replaced by XP; they got a new (to them) computer cause the old one was "full". I have to say I wish I could have first used XP with a 10 year old fully patched system instead of a "well here it is, good luck" XP release so many years ago.
(I threw their full drive away, installed a SCSI RAID array, then XP from a thumbdrive and am now watching HD movies on it, despite having less actual computing power than a Raspberry Pi.)
Need Mercedes parts ?
W2K was fantastic. It was not a consumer OS though, it was NT5 (literally). In the corporate realm it was heavily used though.
Just another ignorant American.
I honestly don't think Microsoft intends on desktop users to adopt Windows 8, Windows 7 is more than enough for desktop users, and Windows 7 is nearly perfect in many aspects for this current age. Windows 8 is about touch and building a bridge between the platforms. I am keeping WIndows 7 for my desktop/laptop...but I will be buying a WIndows 8 tablet (hopefully from Nokia) when they hit the market, and I think that's what Microsoft is hoping you'll do too. This Windows version helps them fill their market void and helps their other products start to revolve around each other, and employees start seeing the benefits at home and at work. Is this Microsoft gambling? I don't think it is, I think it's Microsoft finally connecting the dots of their product division. If Apple has done one thing well for the PC it's forcing Microsoft to make their integration much more seamless (not like the clusterfuck some of their integrations have been in the past.) Windows 8 is a bridge builder, and I don't think they are trying to hit a desktop upgrade cycle so much as hit a market they have been missing out on.
Creating a market can backfire badly on Microsoft.
If they are wise enough to do as Google (the not evil way) and let people install whatever software from wherever they want, there will be almost no change. People are already used to get small software for free for their PCs, and get big ones directly from the developers.
Now, if they go in the other direction (the evil way) and couple market with DRM to fight software piracy, people will take a look at the alternatives. Even people that use no pirated software will, and they can lose some market share. And I really don't know if MS can afford to lose some market share...
Now, you can bet what direction MS will go (the evil or the not evil way?). I won't try to guess.
Rethinking email
Actually the Xbox division has been profitable for a good number of years now. I think your frothy hatred for Microsoft is clouding your view on...facts, like the fact that even though tablets have a market now...PC sales are still growing even in a tough economy. One market is mature, one is young...the PC market isn't going to get double digit growth like the tablet market. So now Microsoft is tackling a the market they failed to successfully tap in the early 2000s, and if you think their sway in the PC industry won't help them to push their way into the mobile market, then you're a fool. There is a reason they are making their products be built on the same codebase.
This year's Ford takes about 2 years to get going, down from 3 or 4 or more in years past. MS OS 'versions' are just this years' model. And if it fails, like the Fiat 500 in the US, oh well, they'll just roll out something else next time around.
the Alphastations would have been the perfect workstation platforms for NT, as would the Silicon Graphics Magnum, the DeskStation Tyne and other offerings from Carrera, Aspen and Microway
Considering the Alpha could run VMS and Unix and the others you mention ran Unix, why should anyone consider running NT on them?
Why would anyone run an OS that lacks a decent command language in a professional machine?
Coding geeks may get tablets as a secondary computing device, but probably never as a primary one.
You can get keyboards easily enough which work with iPads, and broadcast the screen to a large screen as well. There are other more significant hurdles to coding on an iPad really at the moment though - not fast enough for compiling for a start, and Apple are pretty user-hostile when it comes to technical users; they want it locked down tight for their own reasons. However as you say, there's no reason the iPad has to become a primary computing device for everyone - it may well for some people who never really needed a computer in the first place and actually enjoy the fact it is locked down and they are less likely to mess it up or get it infected with a virus (less vectors like flash, and a better sandbox means less viruses at the moment at least).
It can still be wildly successful and not at all a niche product even if it doesn't appeal to geeks on slashdot, or perhaps even because it doesn't. As the original less storage than a nomad comment proved being disliked on slashdot is often a sign something will do particularly well in the real world even whilst it is decried here as a 'toy' and not for serious work.
Take a look at the Control Panel from Windows XP on. They set up this categories view as the default. The problem was they didn't think it through so that even their own programs, think Outlook, didn't have a place there.
So in order to get to the Mail icon, or Java, or any other 3rd party icon you have to switch views to the icon view to find things.
Now look at Windows 8. It's going to be like that for everything. They have this new whiz-bang interface, but it's half-assed, not thought through and it's going to be inconsistent with every application that comes along. It's going to be a god-damned mess from the get go.
It might look good on a brand new tablet/notebook hybrid but as soon as you install anything on there other than what it came with it's going to start looking like crap.
It's not going to work on a domain. I doubt it'll work for gamers. No DIY enthusiast is going to be making anything for it. The best Microsoft can hope for is that they siphon off some money that would have gone into Apple, but in the long run their trajectory is headed straight down hill. All the company can do is flail around like a wounded pig as it slowly dies. Every chance the company has had for the last 10 years to make a move in the right direction they have stuffed it up.
The should have fired Steve Balmer a decade ago. They should have made a bitchin' linux distro in the late 90's instead of battling it tooth and nail. They never should have thought of the Zune. Plays-for-sure? stupid. Xbox? good job guys, you killed Sega, happy now? BTW, how's that working out, made any money yet? Bing? Oh yeah? You didn't watch much Monty Python did you? Vista? dear god. Windows 7? It's just vista but with a couple of mild interface tweaks. Office 2007? Everyone hates the ribbon so what do you do, put it on everything. Idiots. Office 2010? Really, you moved the tabs to the left in the Options dialog and charged for it? Screw you too Microsoft.
No, apple has not done well to capture those markets. Apple Tablets are a joke, suited exactly for little more than toilet-sitting.
Motion Computing has done well to capture those markets.
http://www.motioncomputing.com/products/tablet_pc_c5.asp
You'll notice a big pile of difference between them and Apple iPads in both concept, focus, and function.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
for the unwashed masses, handheld computing is becoming a norm, and with that market seeing little MSOS integration, it must be a kick in the pocket of MS through 'missed sales' of WinWhatever. MS will have to do some very hard work to compete as they are a couple of years behind the leaders and my guess is that they have only a few things to pin their hopes on;
1/ Hope that Nokia hardware and Windows is a hit with the public
2/ Hope that there is a painless way to develop for the desktop OS and mobile OS at the same time.
3/ Understand that for the cost of their WinOS software, people are buying whole mobile solutions from someone else.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
No one actually goes out and buys the latest OS anyways. You buy a computer and Windows comes with it, regardless of if you plan on installing Ubuntu or not., and definitely regardless of if the OS is any good or not.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
They put it in a box and sell it!
"....can they pull it off again?"
Sure; and I can tell you why in three words:
Pointy. Haired. Bosses.
You just try to tell your typical PHB that there's something out there besides Office, or that the workstation and the Operating System are two separate things, and watch their eyes instantly glaze over.
Hell, we still use Centrex in this dump!
Regards;
AFAIK, the only Windows ever supported on the Itanium was Server 2003 & 2008. After that, MS, like Oracle, Red Hat, Canonical and some others, announced that it was discontinuing support for that platform. Therefore, the only OSs currently supported on Itanic, aside from HP/UX (god knows how they're any better off than they were w/ a tried and tested PA-RISC) are Debian Linux and FreeBSD. NetBSD 5.1 just has a source level port to the thing, which from what I understand, has yet to be tested.
When they bought a new PC, most people were not aware that Windows Vista had problems, and they bought another PC to get Windows 7. In my opinion, Microsoft compensated for the long delay in releasing a new OS by arranging the rapid sale of 2 OSs.
I've been using Linux for ten years, and I fucking love it, but I've read a hundred thousand of these articles, where techbloggers report on the OS WARS as if something may actually change, and nothing ever does, at least for Desktop systems. Windows made some inroads with gadgets, but I still only know one person who owns a mac. And a handful of people who use Linux, all of whom belong to my LUG. Take it from someone who actually did it, changing your operating system can be really difficult for someone without a technical background. Most people won't do it without a good reason. If windows 8 sucks, people will keep using Windows 7.
All I want is the start button. This is how I feel about Windows 8 so far: http://creativefisher.blogspot.com/2012/03/where-is-my-start-button.html